All three countries you mentioned operate under the euro and do not have issuing authority. This means that the three countries essentially operate in a synthetic metallist framework, not chartalist. Contrast the situation with those same countries under their own sovereign currency. If Greece expanded their money supply too much, it's ability to import would decline because of currency devaluation; however as a financial tool, currency devaluation is far more preferable than austerity. Countries would gladly choose to import less in the short and medium-term rather than impose harmful austerity that has real negative impacts. Sure, if a country is resource constrained, too much devaluation will be harmful, but the US has virtually limitless resources compared to most countries. If tomorrow it chose to massively expand fiscal spending, the worst case scenario would be that the US would import less goods spurring domestic production from all our underutilized productive capacity and labor. Our real terms of trade would at the very worst be at balance.

Microsoft doesn't really have time to fudge millions of telemetry numbers. You may argue that telemetry data is biased or skewed towards larger organizations if you want, but the reality is Office is used because large influential organizations use it and Microsoft introduces the features that they want. Everyone doesn't "need" a different 10%, they learn to use or choose to use a different 10%, its an empirical fact. Most people don't learn Office feature sets formally, but rather in organically. Because the the product allows to accomplish similar things in a variety of ways, some way efficient and some not, people just stick with the path they know. This is especially clear in my case when I try to leverage pivot tables in Google Spreadsheet vs. Excel 2010/2013. Google Spreadsheet allows me to do most of the basic and some of the intermediate data processing I need to build models, but in order to do 100% of the job, I'd have to jump through many more hoops to get Google Spreadsheet to do what I need it to do. Anyone who uses Google Docs and says they haven't had to change their authoring workflow is not being 100% genious. In fact Google's whole strategy has been to tell people that the features its product lacks isn't really that important to begin with, and they're right for a subset of the general user population. This strategy also also allow Google to come closer to feature parity...thought it'll never really happen.

The point is that if your organization invests in Microsoft Office across the enterprise and chooses not to leverage more advanced productivity/collaboration features, you're pretty much paying for compatibility and throwing a lot of money down the drain. Such organizations may find it better to either fire their IT staff or CIO, OR switch to Google or OpenOffice. Organizations with lower quality information workers may find the switch away from Office just fine, but I would argue that the goal should be to provide tools that raise productivity capabilities of the workers. And while I don't discount your experience, I have dealt with massive customer bases that have made that switch only to come back to MS Office stack. Office365 has come such a long way that today its almost a no-brainer compared to Google Apps.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensen...

i know this...i'm telling you the approximate real statistic from Microsoft Telemetry circa 2008.

everything you've said is essentially backwards from how the economy really works. Today inflation is under 2%. Interests rates/risk-free rates are the lowest ever which businesses like. The federal government does not make up too much of the economy. Your statement must be qualified with regard to the strength of the private sector and foreign sector. During a recession or depression you want the federal government to be bigger. Today its not spending nearly enough and as a society we are losing in real terms while people like you work about a number on a spreadsheet.

  As for your business partner example, the Federal government is not a business or a household. The Federal government is a sovereign issuer of the currency AND user of the currency, while state and local governments, businesses, and households are only the users of the currency.

The US Debt is a residual that has no economic meaning.

You understanding and application of CPI is completely wrong. It is not about what one single dollar can buy, but what all the dollars in a household can buy. In real terms, US households are far more wealthy today than in the early 20th century. No amount of dollars in 1920 could buy a telephone or electricity, or computers, or cheap high quality imports. The average US household went from spending over a quarter of its household income on food in the mid 20th century to less than 20% today. That is real wealth.

you should read economic theories that compare metallism vs. chartalism. Today we have a social and political class that think, behave, and operate as if we are under a metallist framework, when in fact there is no question that the US and most of the world operates under a chartalist framework. People have no clue what "the full faith and credit of the United States" actually means, and I wish this sentence would be abolished because all this really mean today is that as long as the federal government demands taxes paid in US dollars, and it alone is the sole issuer, there will always be a demand for US dollars. As long as the US government continues to effectively collect taxes and spend money, the US dollar will always have credibility. Even if no foreigners or private sector people buy US T-bills, the federal reserve will always buy them.

Of course you can't keep printing more and more, the problem that most technology people have is that they have little operational clue as to how the financial system and monetary system actually work. Trying to understand the modern financial world through the lens of undergraduate macroeconomics is like trying to understand graph theory with only a background in algebra.

The reality is that the federal government can print/spend as much money as it wants. The only real constraint is whether this spending causes an untenable amount of inflation. The US National Debt is in fact simply a residual that has no real economic meaning. Even if it was twice as large and inflation doubled to 3.5% or even 5%, it would be absolutely fine.

Lastly, you have to remember that the federal government has another tool to combat inflation, which is taxes. Taxes hedge inflationary risks by removing money from circulation. Federal spending adds money to circulation.

They skirt around this by not offering in app office365 subs.

Regarding your Pareto principle, the actual statistic is 90% of users only use 10% of the feature on aggregate. The problem is that every individual in the 90% uses a different 10%. Microsoft telemetry backs this up, and this is why they don't split the product up even further. Consider Excel. A researcher uses a very different subset of the app compared to an engineer or financial analyst. There isn't a year that goes by where I don't see a non-trivial usage model for Excel. As for PowerPoint and Word, the same idea applies but is less apparent until you factor in line-of-business integration of the docs and app on the server side, natively or via add-ons.

While there is definitely a consumer case to argue that Office is overkill for home use, as long as business find value in using the advanced features of Office, people will continue to use Office at home, whether or not they personally utilize said advanced features.

*former MSFT employee*

Define "imminent" please.

I think the outrage becomes slightly more relevant because Mozilla is a non-profit organization. There are a whole host of "values" that color the perceptions of organizational donors, supporters, and employees. The last few years, political activism in the tech world on social issues has increased a lot. A decade ago, this CEO would not have faced much scrutiny, but today organizational leaders face numerous litmus tests both from the left and right, especially if the organization is non-profit. It speaks to the polarization in our politics, because the issue of gay marriage has nothing to do with the mission of Mozilla Foundation.

It's actually not their road. Each step of the way, local state and federal government has allowed them to build, often times with significant subsidy and tax breaks. We have sanctioned their monopoly/oligopoly, and now it's time to break it up.

The strength and credibility of the dollar is unquestioned, and it will remain unquestioned so long as the federal government spends money and collects taxes without causing too much inflation.

To quote a Jain scholar on the absurdity of creationist belief,
"Some foolish men declare that creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill advised and should be rejected.
If God created the world, where was he before the creation? If you say he was transcendent then and needed no support, where is he now?
How could God have made this world without any raw material? If you say that he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression.
If you declare that this raw material arose naturally you fall into another fallacy, For the whole universe might thus have been its own creator, and have arisen quite naturally.
If God created the world by an act of his own will, without any raw material, then it is just his will and nothing else — and who will believe this silly nonsense?
If he is ever perfect and complete, how could the will to create have arisen in him? If, on the other hand, he is not perfect, he could no more create the universe than a potter could.
If he is form-less, action-less and all-embracing, how could he have created the world? Such a soul, devoid of all modality, would have no desire to create anything.
If he is perfect, he does not strive for the three aims of man, so what advantage would he gain by creating the universe?
If you say that he created to no purpose because it was his nature to do so, then God is pointless. If he created in some kind of sport, it was the sport of a foolish child, leading to trouble.
If he created because of the karma of embodied beings [acquired in a previous creation] He is not the Almighty Lord, but subordinate to something else
If out of love for living beings and need of them he made the world, why did he not make creation wholly blissful free from misfortune?
If he were transcendent he would not create, for he would be free: Nor if involved in transmigration, for then he would not be almighty. Thus the doctrine that the world was created by God makes no sense at all,
And God commits great sin in slaying the children whom he himself created. If you say that he slays only to destroy evil beings, why did he create such beings in the first place?
Good men should combat the believer in divine creation, maddened by an evil doctrine. Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning or end, and is based on the principles, life and rest. Uncreated and indestructible, it endures under the compulsion of its own nature."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...

My favorite is the critique section in the wiki of this notion.

The FCC needs to get out of our bedrooms! The government has no business coming between a man's penis and the wireless carrier that services his porn habits.

So your argument is that the the US would import less. China would be shooting itself in the foot if it sold all it's USD reserves and treasury bills. Russia would be doing the same thing because they are both net exporters. Even if the countries did that, US has many other places it can import from and also has the ability to ramp domestic production. Any currency warfare would cause far more suffering to Russia or China than to the US.

I'm not sure you fully understand why they hold on to USD denominated financial assets (t-bills and reserves).